Microsoft dynamic CRM???

What the heck does it do? Im reading the page at M$'s site and I read the wiki but I still dont understand what the heck it does for a business. My boss told me to look into it to see if it is for us and Im not getting anything from what I have read so far. Might have something to do with not having any business training or experience. Thanks!

 

CRM is Customer Relationship Management software. Basically just a database of your customers and stuff relating to them so you can be informed about them on the spot, what rates they get, what they've purchased in the past, etc., so you know what to tell them, who to badger because they're paying late constantly, who hasn't bought anything recently, and so on.

It depends a lot on what kind of customer data you have, what data you want to start tracking, and what you want to do with it.

 

Salesforce.com is another similar product to check into. I prefer it actually.

 

I assumed it was something like that since it integrates with outlook. Thanks for the description now Ill need to price it out for the business and implement it if they choose.

 

Look up Great Plains Software. That is the original company (still based in Fargo, ND) that MSFT bought to build out their Dynamix software line.

Dynamix is the MSFT answer to SAP, Oracle Financials, and Lawson with Lawson and the low end of the market being where Dynamix lives.

CRM is one module within Dynamix.

The way that Dynamix is put together, it's damned silly to implement one module and not commit your company fully to the whole package. MSFT hasn't been fully successful separating their Dynamix modules as being capable of economic standalone implementation.

The biggest thing that Dynamix CRM has going for it is a good integration with Exchange. Other packages offer the same level of integration with your messaging platforms though.

If all your company wants/needs is CRM, there are other alternatives that are cheaper, easier to implement, and not as intrusive as the MSFT offering.

But do your own research. You are going to want to talk to sales and implementation reps from MSFT, Lawson, and salesforce.com

 

I used to research this particular CRM also, it was a right pain to setup the SQL side of things using a test environment on the Server. My main job at the time was actually Marketing, so imagine my surprise when I was told to set this thing up!

But in the end we didn't use MS Dynamics CRM, we opted to stay with SugarCRM which is an open source alternative. You can even trial it out for free apparantly so don't know if this useful for your research!

 

Thanks for the feedback! I will look at the alternatives and see what suits us best. I am just an IT guy so a lot of the business jargon is lost with me. Basically the boss wants and thinks this will automate marketing and I think he is crazy. But ill get back to him with this info.

 

Doesn't do anything to automate marketing. It does make your marketing people more efficient, though.

 

It also depends on how much muscle you need in your solution. MSCRM is a pretty powerful package that integrates with exchange and outlook and with the new version on the horizon, office. The idea behind MSCRM was to create the product and have the partners build extensions around it. If you have a small community, I honestly wouldn't recommend it to you as it's really better suited to medium size and up companies.

There are cheaper alternatives out there for crm such as Sugar which has an open source community addition. You can go to there site and do a demo as well as with MSCRM.

MS CRM Trial 30 day: https://signin.crm.dynamics.com/portal/signup/signup.aspx?orglcid=1033&lc=1033

Sugar CRM: Demo Sugar | SugarCRM - Commercial Open Source CRM

let me know if you want any more information...

 

Honestly we are small enough that excel spreadsheets or a small DB will work just fine. As for notifications we have outlook for that. The software alone will cost ~$10k and the implementation and training will cost alot as well. We dont have a marketing team, we only have 15 people total. Honestly Im going to work further into my DB access app and see if that will work for marketing contact management, but for now we are going to perfect our spreadsheet to make things run more efficient.

I just got out of a long meeting and realized that marketing needs 2 things: 1) a dedicated office manager/marketing type person (have an office admin but need to get her working more on the marketing aspect) and 2) The boss needs to get out of the old timer mindset of printing everything out (he doesnt bring his laptop anywhere, he would rather carry 40lbs of papers).

So once I can break him of that habit, actually work on my DB app, and finish the remote setup I think we should be golden.

 

There are all kinds of third-party addons/snapins for outlook and exchange that can be used to automate marketing tasks. Bing search will likely come up with a pile of examples.

However, if your people (!!!) aren't able to make the needed changes in their workflow to use the new tools, the time/expense to automate things is wasted effort.

In your analysis you are going to have to make a people determination as well as a toolset determination.

For a small shop like yours, simply providing leadership and work direction might be more effective.

 

Try looking at this, this will probably fit the bill

Outlook Contact Manager

Microsoft Outlook 2010 with Business Contact Manager is a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool for small business owners because they can use it to help them improve the effectiveness of their customer service, sales, and marketing efforts.

Business Contact Manager for Outlook is an add-on to Outlook, so small business owners can use Outlook 2010 to store personal information and manage their calendars, while using Business Contact Manager for Outlook to help them run their businesses.

Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2010 - Outlook - Microsoft Office